Planet Earth II (BBC1) | iPlayer
NW (BBC2) | iPlayer
My Mother and Other Strangers (BBC1) | iPlayer
Kids on the Edge (C4) | All 4
The Grand Tour | Amazon Prime
I rarely have the luxury of going back to recently reviewed stuff – there’s just too great an agglomeration of new programming every week, for ever, and while much unassailable dreck can be avoided (some tinkering with a soldering-iron on the remote, resulting in a thrilling little electric shock if I should ever press the button for ITV2, scythes the workload immensely) there’s always the trembling fear of missing what might be the new Happy Valley, the next Black Mirror, the coming Michael McIntyre (I’m not entirely serious about one of these).
But Planet Earth II simply insists on our attention. Two weeks in of six, and it’s pretty clear that we will seldom get closer to being able to say, open-mouthed, half aghast, “Ah. Finally. I get it. That’s what television’s for.” This second series is subtly different from the first: better filmed, though the first series was no slouch, and Attenborough invites us to take sides, which I don’t remember before. There’s no open anthropomorphising, just gentle nudges as to the manner of partisanship in which we might wish to indulge. Highlight of the second sublime week was the footage of ibex clinging with insouciance to perpendicular cliffs. I think I may introduce a running feature, maybe a sidebar, entitled “Bastard animal of the week”. First week’s winner, undoubtedly those racer snakes; last week, the red fox waiting lasciviously for a baby ibex to remember, even for a second, that sheer willpower isn’t actually meant to conquer gravity.
NW, the adaptation of Zadie’s Smith’s bestseller, was something of a triumph, not least for Rachel Bennette in successfully cramming such ambition into 90 short minutes – my, didn’t they simply fly by – while remaining loyal to the book’s many nuances.
It was often unsettling watching, but never less than captivating. And it might have been particularly unhappy for self-satisfied liberals everywhere, for whom November’s not working out so well; it was quite shorn of any feelgood thinking about happy multiculturalism. Rather, the four loosely interrelated tales about London lives between Kilburn and Primrose Hill stubbornly, almost wilfully, refused to offer pat lessons about integration; like real life, which is messy, shonky, determinedly unglib and ever surprising.
First surprise was Natalie (a standout Nikki Amuka-Bird), throwing off her picture-perfect and hard-fought-for lawyerly life to return to feeling something, anything, by – oh dear, and we watched through wretched fingers – forays, and not just online, into scuzzy hook-up sites. Then there was the shock of Felix (a joyous performance by O-T Fagbenle), slowly, cloyingly slowly, bleeding his last in an unlovely street suddenly bereft of passersby.
This was arguably not so much about race as about class, and money, and that less than happy London contradiction in which you can pass, in a coffee-break stroll from say Maida Vale to Regent’s Park, from insane-house-price privilege to heartless poverty and out again. But race certainly got a look-in: perhaps only Zadie Smith, with her unerring ear for language, patter, patois, irony and contradiction, could have got away with having a black woman (Natalie, born Keisha) sneer so dismissively at others from her background who hadn’t made it, and yet turn out to have the saddest life of all, riddled with undeserved guilt over class and race betrayal.
My Mother and Other Strangers, the first of five Sunday-night offerings from the BBC, was better than Poldark, but then I didn’t like Poldark, so that’s not saying much. It’s an incredibly hackneyed premise: US airmen stationed near Lough Neagh in the 40s brawl with the snaggle-toothed locals for the hearts of their women. At least this removes the temptation to make all of the Irishmen tousle-haired broth-of-a-boy rural charmers. Removes it so far as to make them positively sinister, if not actively inbred: there are pub-based stand-offs which make Straw Dogs look like Doc Martin.
It’s written by Ballykissangel’s Barry Devlin, and stars, among others, Hattie Morahan as a pretty English lass who’s unaccountably fallen for (or at least married) the ever-scowling thunderbrowed landlord of the teensy Moybeg pub. Morahan is undoubtedly a good actor, not least by virtue of being Anna Cartaret’s daughter, but already I’m getting slightly miffed at her constant faces of outraged surprise, like the woman in 50s B-movies who’s always first to see the monster. What she needs is for a handsome USAF officer to walk through the pub door, quote Tennyson and whisk her off to points sunnily American, and, oh look, there’s Aaron Staton from Mad Men.
For all this, I’m still a sucker for this kind of thing, and if it doesn’t quite beat Poldark into his own cocked hat, it still doesn’t make me run towards the off switch in a state of such panic I might fumble my way into an electric shock.
Kids on the Edge, the first of three docs following the work of the Tavistock and Portman Gender Identity Development Service clinic, kicked off with some worrying statistics and a couple of troubled children. Ten years ago there were 40 referrals for possible gender reassignment for children; last year, 1,400. Among all the inevitable hand-wringing – this’ll be talked about, by which I mean pontificated upon – what I do hope is not lost is the subtlety of this wise documentary from Peter Beard, which resisted easy answers.
Even the Tavistock staff admit that Ashley (eight, formerly Ashton) and Matt (11, formerly Matilda) might just be confused, and are exceedingly careful with decisions to administer “blockers”, which will essentially stop puberty. Much research is in its infancy. As Dr Polly Carmichael said, “awareness has raised exponentially over the past year… culture and society are moving faster in what they think we should do about it than the evidence base.” It may, in (my) other words just be a phase, it may be an urgent dysphoria, but until we know more: back off, all tabloid mid-market websites, you know who you are. Both the mothers were revelations of patience, love and robust learning curves. I hope Beard goes back in five years.
The Grand Tour, I have to reluctantly say – not because I fall far short of being the world’s most besotted Clarkson fan, but because of all the 18 months of fuss, the fake controversies, the hype over what is still just a show about cars – worked spectacularly. It’s still just a show about cars, but that looks increasingly like saying Armageddon or The Martian were “just” films about astronauts.
With a crazily expanded budget from Amazon, Clarkson, May and Hammond get to leave the BBC – Auntie must have forgiven someone, as the opening sees Jeremy C harrumphing out of Broadcasting House in the rain – for the big skies of California. And a tented desert studio, and hagiographic welcome from Americans, many possessed of the XX chromosome. The filming is, as it should be, spectacular in its location, whizz and attention to detail. But the not-so-secret ingredient remains this: it’s essentially three pals in a bar without booze, just shooting the semi-scripted, often wryly funny, breeze. Just a richer, warmer breeze. This is what the BBC must be kicking themselves for having forgotten, with this year’s unloved Top Gear.
